“Is this going to be bad?” Tanya asked.
“Not all.”
“Lakida!” Tanya called her down for dinner.
“Do you want help setting up?” I asked. I could smell the barbeque sauce. I got up but bumped into the folding tray, knocking over my margarita. The glass broke on the linoleum floor.
“Don’t worry,” Tanya said. She poured me another glass.
I fingered the rim of salt and licked it off my fingers. “Sorry, I’m a klutz. Let me clean up.”
“It’s nothing.” She took out a broom and swept the broken glass into a dustpan.
Lakida came downstairs wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. She was one of the shortest kids in school, but she’d call some of her friends, “daughter,” as in “How come you didn’t come to school yesterday, daughter?”
“Oh my God, Mr. Lam, what are you breaking in my house?” Lakida asked.
“’Kida stop playing. Check on your cake,” Tanya said. She leaned in towards me and said, “She’s making carrot cake for you.”
“Either she’s real sweet,” I said, “or she knows she’s in trouble.”
“Don’t play me like that, Lam,” ’Kida said.
“Go ahead and sit down Mr. Lam. ’Kida will bring your plate over.”
The living rooms of these new units were smaller, the ceiling also lower. The kitchen was a kitchenette, no room for a table. I pictured my father eating with my brother’s family. They’d sit around the couch, the same one Bah Ba had shipped from Minnesota
years ago.
I took a gulp of the margarita. Lakida brought over my plate: barbeque chicken, corn, and potato salad on the side. They sat down with theirs.
The conference would go as expected. I showed them Lakida’s grades. I recycled comments from previous conferences, “Do these grades reflect your best?” “What’s stopping you from achieving the way you know that you can?” We ended with an action plan, what each of us would do differently to help Lakida succeed. I took notes and promised copies.
This was a breeze compared to two other parent-teacher conferences I’d had that week. One was another house visit with Eric, a Chinese kid with a single mom. It was always the missing Chinese fathers that made my own father loom over the parent-teacher meetings, never the Chinese dads who showed up to the conferences. That wasn’t the kind of dad I had.
Eric had crummy grades. He’d come late to school all the time. His mother didn’t know what to do. She had to leave for work early in the mornings, so she couldn’t get him out of bed herself. She suggested that if her son arrived tardy, I should go old school on him, reach for a ruler or just slap him upside the head. I explained why I couldn’t do that, but I couldn’t think of the Chinese word for “illegal.” I just kept saying “I can’t do that.” She thought I was a softie.
The other parent conference was held in my classroom. I thought it was going to be a normal meeting. Student wasn’t doing great—action plan. Boom, go home. But we almost didn’t get to her grades. The father had come back from El Salvador, and his wife and his daughter Jenna, my advisee, had discovered that he had been cheating with a woman in El Salvador. No wonder Jenna’s grades had taken a dive. The parent-teacher conference would be the first time they’d have a real conversation since the news of the father’s affair. At home, there’d been a thick silence. I’d learned all this just minutes before the meeting began when Jenna confided in me in the hallway.
We didn’t get far in the parent-teacher conference before the father said something about Jenna needing to be honest. He meant about her skipping classes, but she interrupted him before he could finish. “You’re full of shit,” she said to him. “You talk about me being honest. Look at you.” She had dark eye shadow and lipstick. I was secretly cheering her on—Tell him! Tell him!—proud she was calling out her old man.
“Don’t talk to you father that way,” the mother said.
“No,” the father said, eyes tearing up, “I deserve it.”
The conflict resolution strategies I knew, I-statements or paraphrasing, seemed absurd for this. Couldn’t imagine saying to the father: “Can you please paraphrase what your daughter just said about you?”
Jenna left and skedaddled down the hallway. The mother went after her, so it was just me and the dad. He was slightly shorter than me, but his meaty hands and broad shoulders gave him a rugged look. I liked him, liked his parenting style, firm but compassionate, but this didn’t make it any easier for me to sit with him, a father who betrayed his family.
The walls of my classroom were mostly bare. A lifeless teal dominated. Decorating was at the bottom of my to-do list. The most ornamental thing in the room was two table runners hanging vertically, orange and red-striped. On the chalk tray rested Mao’s “Little Red Book,” thank-you letters from students, and a laminated picture of Javon that was made for his memorial at the school.
“I don’t know what to do, Mr. Lam,” Jenna’s father said. “She won’t talk to me.”
I had to get him Kleenex from my desk. I probably needed a tissue myself, but I was trying to hold it together. “Give her time,” I said.
“I don’t see her changing.”
“I know you’re a good father,” I said. It was like I was talking to my own father. I didn’t want to continue, but I forced out some lines. “Don’t give up on her,” I said, “even though she’s got nothing but mean things to say. You’ll have to take it for a while. Prove to her you’re truly sorry.”
We managed to reconvene and actually talk about Jenna’s grades. I’d convinced her to come back in, give her dad a second chance. I was a hypocrite, I know, but Jenna wasn’t
